‘And then we have my personal favourite,’ Baranelli continued, smiling. ‘The astronaut.’
Peering out of the aircraft’s windows, Adams and Lynn looked down at a figure etched on to the side of a small hill. The light caught the image perfectly, and they could both see the design of a man, seemingly wearing some sort of helmet, right hand raised in greeting. But to whom? To what?
‘Well?’ Baranelli asked his guests, clearly excited. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s certainly interesting,’ Lynn replied. ‘What’s its purpose?’
Baranelli turned away from the window and raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘That is the question! What is any of it for? What do you think?’ he asked, a professor testing his students.
‘There’ve been many theories over the years,’ Lynn started, ‘beginning with Kosok’s belief that it represented some sort of astronomical calendar, but computer modelling showed that the alignments were no more common than random chance.’
‘Indeed,’ Baranelli agreed, nodding his head. ‘And what else?’
‘Well, I think the prevailing theory is that they are religious walkways, linked to water or fertility cults.’
‘Yes, many people are of that opinion,’ the professor concurred. ‘Ethnographical and historical data seem to indicate that worship of mountains and water sources dominated Nazcan religion and culture from ancient times. The lines can therefore be seen as sacred paths, leading the faithful to areas where such deities could be worshipped.’
‘Many people… but not you?’ Lynn probed.
Baranelli laughed at the idea. ‘Certainly not me!’
‘And so what do you believe?’ Adams asked.
‘It is time we landed,’ Baranelli said in reply. ‘We will continue our talk over lunch perhaps?’
21
An hour later, Baranelli was ensconced with his two guests at a private table back at the Nazca Lines Hotel, a large glass of Chianti in his hand as he continued his lecture.
‘Have you heard of the “ancient astronaut” theory?’ he asked them.
Lynn nodded her head, sipping from a glass of water. ‘Back in the nineteen sixties, Erich von Däniken proposed that the straight lines were runways for extraterrestrial spacecraft, in fact he saw the whole Nazca plain as some sort of gigantic airport.’
‘That’s right,’ Baranelli said, ‘although we’re not sure if the surface would have been strong enough to take the weight of repeated landings. But he also had other interesting theories about the rest of the geoglyphs, claiming that the Nazcans drew them once these extraterrestrials had left, presumably having returned to their home planet.’
‘Why would they do that?’ Adams asked.
‘Similar things have been documented around the world,’ Baranelli explained. ‘So-called “cargo cults” emerge when an indigenous people is visited by a more highly advanced culture, ascribing to them — and their advanced “cargo” — supernatural significance, seeing them as deities and gods. There was a prevalence of such cults in the south-west Pacific Ocean in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the islands were used by the Americans and Japanese as staging posts for the war effort, bringing in huge amounts of materiel. When the bases closed after the war and these goods dried up, the island populations tried to encourage further deliveries of goods by building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment, and worshipping them.’
‘And this is what von Däniken believed happened here?’ Adams asked.
‘Yes, and he didn’t just stop there, he believed that religion as a whole, all over the world, was created to worship extraterrestrials who had come down to earth, amazing primitive man with their advanced technology and leaving them to come up with supernatural explanations for what they had seen.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Adams said sceptically. ‘So God was an alien?’
‘One of von Däniken’s chapter headings — indeed probably the one that made him famous — is “Was God an Astronaut?”’ Baranelli explained, a smile on his face.
‘And just what evidence did he give to support that claim?’ Adams asked, still not buying it.
‘You have to understand that it is not just von Däniken who has argued this over the years, but many people — astronomers, astrophysicists, historians, philosophers, you name it. There is a large body of what they would term evidence in support of the theory, although others would say it was a body of curious anomalies rather than outright evidence.’
‘What sort of anomalies?’ Lynn asked, still trying to find a link between her own discovery and this talk of ancient aliens.
‘The Nazca Lines are one such anomaly — where did they come from, who designed them, and for what purpose? Does the fact that they can only be seen from the air indicate that whoever drew them meant for them to be seen by airborne peoples? And where would this flying technology have come from so long ago? So we have an anomaly, something that doesn’t seem to fit in with regular historical or archaeological knowledge.
‘And what else do we have?’ Baranelli asked before Adams or Lynn had the chance to reply. ‘A sixteenth-century map discovered in the ruins of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul shows Antarctica at the bottom, with the land mass shown much as it would appear if it were free from ice — something which it has not been for fifteen million years. So was this a copy from maps made millions of years ago, or did this sixteenth-century admiral have access to ground-penetrating radar and satellite analysis? And if he did, where could this technology have possibly come from?
‘Then there are the various ancient artworks which show what seem to be alien visitors, or astronauts with helmets — much like the geoglyph we have just seen, in fact. These can be found from ancient cave drawings in the African Sahara to Mayan temples in Mexico, and everywhere in between — Zimbabwe, South Africa, Russia, Val Camonica in northern Italy, Uzbekistan, the list goes on and on. Always the same images — what seem to be man-like figures in strange clothes and helmets. The carving from the Temple of the Inscriptions in Palenque in Mexico, for example, clearly shows an astronaut-like figure sitting at the controls of a miniature rocket-ship. Can that be explained conventionally?’
Baranelli took a large drink of his wine before ploughing on. ‘And what about such mysteries as the Mayan calendar, predicting eclipses for untold thousands of years? Where did they get the technology to calculate such things? Ancient electric batteries have been found in Iraq, nine thousand-year-old crystal lenses in Assyria, an iron post in a courtyard in Delhi that has not rusted in four thousand years, a twenty-thousand-ton granite block turned upside down in Peru — who can explain such things?
‘And let us not forget the Great Pyramid of Khufu, and all of its surrounding temples, the Great Sphinx, and so on. Do we know, even now, how such things were built? Or why? The Great Pyramid was built from over two million stone blocks, some of which weighed as much as seventy tons. It is the most accurately aligned structure in existence, facing true north with only one-twentieth of one degree of error, and is also located precisely at the centre of the earth’s land mass. The outer casing stones were highly polished and flat to an accuracy of one-hundredth of an inch, and could have been seen from Israel, and perhaps even the moon. Why? The answer is, we simply do not know. We only know these anomalies are there, crying out for an explanation.’
‘And aliens can provide such an explanation?’ Adams asked.